Review: Jawbone Up

Sub Title: Full Circle

Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

It was the third time I lost the cap that I really got pissed off. Because this time, I had no idea how, or where, it had come loose. I strode around my apartment, cursing it, mentally calculating how many of these caps I’d have to buy in the space of a year, given that I’d misplaced the same tiny nub of metal and plastic three times in the last two weeks. I wondered at the decision-making process that led to the removable end cap, because it encapsulates (sorry) everything I don’t like about Jawbone’s otherwise wonderful, recently revived, back-from-the-dead Up activity-tracking bracelet.

Jawbone Up

8/10

Wired

Delightfully handsome, and comes in a variety of colors. Long battery life means you won’t always be charging. Despite our efforts at drowning, dropping and generally smacking around, it stood up to every abuse.

Tired

Syncing is a chore. Sleep tracking could be better. Those replacement caps really ought to be free.

The Yves Behar-designed wristband houses an accelerometer to figure out when you are active and moving, sedentary, or sleeping. Vibrating alerts will wake you in the morning, or after a nap, or notify you when you’ve been inactive for too long. Meanwhile, the smartphone app allows you to enter meals and mood, and after syncing with the bracelet, view how many steps you’ve taken today, or how your sleep went the night before. Much like the Fitbit, it is designed to help you become more aware of your lifestyle, and take steps to make it healthier.

The bracelet itself is both good-looking and comfortable. It also exhibits a build quality that is clearly superior to last year’s version of the Up, which Jawbone had to pull from the market. Jawbone beefed up the band’s waterproofing and gave the circuit board more flex. For the most part, it stays on quite well — there were a few occasions where it snagged on a coat or some other item and came off, but that’s also quite noticeable and I’d be surprised if I lost it that way.

The experience really starts with the app. Download it to your phone (iOS only, for now, although Jawbone says an Android version is on the way) and enter your basic body metrics: height, weight and sex. There is a social layer that allows you to search your contacts or Facebook friends, and this populates the app’s activity feed with status updates posted by others also using the Up. You can also go into the settings and add things like a daily alarm clock — a vibrating alert designed to go off when you are sleeping lightly so it doesn’t roust you from a deep slumber — or an activity alert that will buzz the band when you’ve been idle too long.

This last thing, the idle alert, is really great, and one of my favorite features of the bracelet. While most activity trackers are just monitoring, the Up gets prescriptive here. It lets you set alerts to go off if you’ve been inactive for set periods of time. I started off with an alert that goes off every 15 minutes — that quickly got annoying. So I changed it to 45, which turned out to be pretty wonderful.

Inactivity is what kills you and your fat, overworked heart dead. Recent research has shown that even if you are athletic, long stretches of sedentary inactivity will still cut your life short. And so every time the bracelet vibrated, it was like a little reminder saying, “Hey, dude, I don’t want you to die, so get off your ass and move around a little, will you?” And more often than not, I did just that. The bracelet would buzz, and I would get up and walk a bit.

I quickly found myself wishing for more of these alerts. For example, if I’m halfway through the day, and haven’t gotten halfway to my step goal, I’d love a reminder. It might inspire me to walk to the sandwich place down the street instead of the one next door. These seem like natural firmware updates, but the bottom line is that this kind of prescriptive action is absolutely fantastic. It’s got a real ability to make a difference in people’s lives.

Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

The Up also lets you track what you eat, complete with nutrition information. The last version of the Up didn’t count calories. You just snapped a photo of your food so you could be aware of your intake. That’s changed, and now you can track meals in a few ways. You can still snap a photo, but now you can also add nutrition information via a database lookup. There is also an Up food library, and again, you can add nutritional information. And finally, if you’re eating something with a bar code on it, you can scan that and it will automatically add it in.

Here’s the thing: Counting calories is a pain in the ass. It’s an added layer of difficulty and without exceptional motivation, it’s hard to keep up with it. Among my Up contacts, I noticed this was an extremely uncommon activity. It’s a nice feature to have, but my guess is that it will go largely unused by most people, or used for a few weeks and then forgotten.

Because the Up is a bracelet that you wear 24 hours a day, I never forgot and left the house without it.

The real meat of the product is in the activity and sleep tracking. The accelerometer in the bracelet lets it count steps and track movement. Meanwhile, the smartphone software lets you add an activity if you’re doing something that it won’t pick up on based on movement, like an hour working out on a stationary bike or yoga. From this it can extrapolate calories.

I found this to be really great, and the steps it registered were more in less in line with two other pedometers I wore simultaneously. And because the Up is a bracelet that you wear 24 hours a day, I never forgot and left the house without it. The bracelet itself is the killer feature. You won’t ever forget it because you don’t ever have to remember it.

The sleep tracking also works by measuring movement. As you go to bed at night, you hit a button at one end of the bracelet, switching it into sleep mode. The next day, you hit it again to register that you are awake, and the bracelet registers how much time you are in light and deep sleep, or awake. This only worked relatively well.

Yes, it does a great job of figuring out when you fall asleep and when you wake up. It even reveals patterns in your sleep quite nicely. But it seems to lack sensitivity compared to other devices.

I was wearing the Up with two other sleep-tracking devices (one worn on the same wrist, even) and both registered me as much more active during the night than the Up did. Not that I needed them to know this. On a night when I consciously woke up four distinct times (sick toddler!) the bracelet claimed I’d snoozed all night long.

And then there’s the matter of how you get data from the bracelet to the app. Which brings me back to the cap.

On one end of the Jawbone Up there’s a removable cap covering a 1/8-inch mini jack — the same kind of jack found on the end of your headphones. And in fact, it plugs into the same place: the headphone port on your iPhone. Fire up the app, plug in the bracelet, and it syncs data from the band. Similarly, it charges using the same jack, which attaches to a USB port via an included connector. Jawbone claims 10 days of battery life, but I consistently got seven.

But the bottom line is that you’re going to be taking the cap on and off. A lot. That’s a problem for two reasons.

First, every time you take it off, you risk losing it. Twice when I misplaced the cap, that was due to my absentmindedly setting it down while the bracelet synced. Losing it wouldn’t be such a big deal if replacements came free, but they don’t. It’s 10 bucks for a three-pack of replacement caps. The cap can come off on its own, too. Twice I popped it off without realizing it and only found it thanks to diligent searching. At the very least, it could use a clasp.

Second, and more importantly, it’s an added layer on a device meant to remove levels of difficulty from health monitoring. The Up experience would be far better if it were a Bluetooth low-energy device and made these transfers wirelessly.

Nothing the Up does is magic. It merely makes all of the tracking mechanisms people have long been doing easier, unified and just invisible. Almost everything about the bracelet is fantastic; just aces. But syncing and charging could use some work.

Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

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